Description
A Times Political Book of the Year 2022
A powerful and revelatory eyewitness account of the American collapse in Afghanistan its desperate endgame and the wars echoing legacy
Elliot Ackerman left the American military ten years ago but his time in Afghanistan and Iraq with the Marines and later as a CIA paramilitary officer marked him indelibly When the Taliban began to close in on Kabul in August of 2021 and the Afghan regime began its death spiral he found himself pulled back into the conflict The official evacuation process was a bureaucratic failure that led to a humanitarian catastrophe Ackerman was drawn into an impromptu effort to arrange flights and negotiate with both Taliban and American forces to secure the safe evacuation of hundreds These were desperate measures taken during a desperate end to Americas longest war but the success they achieved afforded a degree of redemption and for Ackerman a chance to reconcile his past with his present
The Fifth Act is an astonishing human document that brings the weight of twenty years of war to bear on a single week at its bitter end Using the dramatic rescue efforts in Kabul as his lattice Ackerman weaves in a personal history of the wars long progress beginning with the initial invasion in the months after 9/11
It is a play in five acts with a tragic denouement Any reader who wants to understand what went wrong with the wars trajectory will find a trenchant accounting here And yet The Fifth Act is not an exercise in fingerpointing it brings readers into close contact with a remarkable group of characters who fought the war with courage and dedication in good faith and at great personal cost Understanding combatants experiences and sacrifices demands reservoirs of wisdom and the gifts of an extraordinary storyteller In Elliot Ackerman this story has found that authorThe Fifth Act is a first draft of history that feels like a timeless classic
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